


New Lands

by butforthegrace



Category: Once Upon a Time (2011)
Genre: F/M, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-12
Updated: 2011-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:19:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butforthegrace/pseuds/butforthegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You can't relax when you've a small empire to run.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	New Lands

He asks her one day, while she’s pulling on her stockings, if she ever relaxes.

“How would I do that?” she asks, and he laughs, and kisses her on the shoulder.

He doesn’t realize she’s serious.  You can’t relax when you’ve a small empire to run.  He’s always at her side; one would think that he would _know_.

 

 

“I’ll do anything for you,” he told her once, back in the old days—back when the world was still overflowing with magic and she didn’t hold all of it grasped tight in her two fists.  “Anything.”

“Promise me,” she had said, looking into his eyes: so full of trust, so like—but no, she would leave that behind, someday she would leave his memory behind and then she would be free.

“Of course,” he’d breathed, and closed his eyes as she kissed him, feeling his hot blood and skin against her own.

 

 

Or maybe she’d dreamed that.  She gets confused sometimes.  The real memories and the dream ones all feel the same, hazy and quiet and wrong.  Sometimes when someone asks after her son, her Henry, there’s a sharp ache in her throat for a moment before she remembers that she left _that_ Henry behind, in another land, one green and wild and out of her control.

But she’s got control now.  She doesn’t have to keep thinking about that place.

 

 

“I’ll do anything for you,” he says earnestly, both of their hands folded over the pointed metal sheriff’s badge.

“Don’t tell me that,” she snaps, and tries to pull her hand away; but his strong fingers keep hers under them, and anyway she’s not really trying that hard.

This time he’s the one who kisses her.  The badge clatters to the floor, forgotten.  The world shrinks to just the two of them, twined together in the hallway of her empty home.

 

 

 _You are mine,_ she thinks, as she looks at him lying in the bed beside her, as she looks at their hands clasped between their bodies.

That’s what happens when you rework your world and get to do as you want with it: the people you want become yours; the people who have always been yours stay.  It’s all a pattern, repeated over and over again.  The shapes and the names may change, but the stories don’t.  The stories stay the same, in their barest forms; someone in Snow White lies in the glass coffin of a hospital bed, and the huntsman lies to the queen with every breath back in her castle.

 

 

The stories will rearrange themselves someday, she knows.  Stories do that.  They fix themselves eventually.

But maybe they won’t.  She is the storyteller now, after all, and her huntsman, her sheriff, is her faithful scribe.  She speaks.  He writes.  She commands.  He does exactly what she tells him to.

 

 

“I’ll do anything for you.”

“Promise me,” she commands, and she doesn’t know whether he’s the huntsman or the sheriff but his lips are on her neck whispering promises to her throat and if she coats her lips with lipstick that looks enough like blood then maybe this time she can be fairest, she can be _queen_ , and no snow-skinned wretch can unseat her from her apple-and-blood-carved throne.


End file.
